2. Caste and the Hindutva Movement
The
RSS is the ideological fountainhead of the Hindutva movement. Along
with the other organizations that constitute the Sangh Parivar (family
of RSS organizations) -- the VHP, BJP, Bajrang Dal and Sewa Vibhag
among others -- the RSS has done the necessary work of propagating this
sectarian ideology for the last seventy-five years.
Historically,
the RSS has been open primarily to Hindu upper caste men with some
growth in the ranks of intermediate or “backward castes” and Dalits
in
recent times.109 Its leadership has been exclusively
upper caste (dwija110),
primarily Brahmin. The sole non-Brahmin among Sarsanghchalaks (Supreme
Leaders), Prof. Rajendra Singh, was still from the upper castes.
So, while it is possible to immediately detect a “caste bias” in
the
RSS, both historically and by way of contemporary demographics, the
issue has in the recent past become far more complex for interesting
reasons. For one, the BJP and VHP, the electoral and political fronts
of the Sangh, have in the last decade, encouraged the emergence of an
array of backward caste/dalit leadership; Sadhavi Ritambara, Uma
Bharati, Bangaru Laxman, and Narendra Modi, to name the best known.
The emergence of a strident and visible “backward
caste” leadership in
the BJP is often taken as evidence of fundamental change in the
parivar’s relation to caste. It is not uncommon now to hear RSS
supporters say that the Sangh can no longer be called a Brahmin-Baniya
party111 and that it has successfully
overcome its historical legacy. Thus
any effort to explicate the relationship between Hindutva and upper
caste privilege must necessarily contend with two clear areas of
inquiry – the historical articulation of casteist ideology within the
Sangh (1925-1980), and a seemingly new approach to caste within the
Sangh (1980s – present).
The Sangh and
Caste – 1925-1980
The Membership and Leadership: The RSS was started as an organization for all Hindu men and continues to remain, in formal terms, open to all castes.
However, from its very inception it was very clear that the RSS
was primarily an upper-caste organization with no serious intent to
share power with lower castes. As Kancha Ilaiah, a leading
scholar of caste explains:
When
the RSS began working out militant strategies, initially
Brahmin youth were
mobilised… [However, w]hen the ideological congruence between the Hindu
Mahasabha and the RSS began to take place in the face of the
contentious Partition question, the RSS began to transform itself into
a mass militant organisation. To take up rioting campaigns and to
defend its cadre from Muslim attacks it needed a large number of strong
youth. At that stage it had to go beyond the "dwija" social base and
recruit Sudra/OBCs and Dalit youth.112
Such
an expansion of its social base to include (other) Backward Castes and
Dalits did not however mean that the Brahmanical elite was seeking to
share power with the backward castes/dalits. Again, as Ilaiah points
out:
The Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh was the
brainchild of Savarkar and Golwalkar, two Maharashtrian Brahmin
ideologues. When it began to aspire for political power, it was headed
by Deen Dayal Upadhyay, a Bengali Brahmin. Now, several branches of the
RSS such as the Vishwa Hindu Parishad and the Bajrang Dal have come up.
The parent organisation and its branches were quite consciously
controlled by Brahmin leaders/intellectuals.
The
recruitment of “OBCs and Dalits” did not translate to leadership
within
the RSS. Numerous journalists and scholars of caste have commented on
the use of lower caste and Dalit youth primarily as cannon fodder in
riot situations. Further, there are far more subtle ways in which this
hierarchy plays out. For instance, in the RSS the two positions of pracharak (disseminator of thought/ideology) and vicharak (thinker/intellectual) are clearly earmarked. A Dalit person can be a pracharak but would almost never be a vicharak.
The Roots of an Ideology:
Such an institutional analysis of the RSS helps us locate the core
ideology of this foundational organization. The problem however is that
in its officially stated position the RSS claims to be inclusive of all
castes. But such an official position breaks down consistently
and the real basis of the core ideology and its fundamental rootedness
in the worst casteist thinking is exposed again and again. For
instance, the second Sarsanghchalak, M. S. Golwalkar, writing in the
second decade after the formation of the RSS, describes Manu, the
author of Manusmriti, the Vedic book of law, as the:
first
and greatest lawgiver of the world [who] lays down in his code,
directing all the peoples of the world to go to Hindusthan [sic] to
learn their duties at the holy feet of 'eldest born' Brahmins of this
land. (Golwalkar,1939, pp.55-56).
The Manusmriti
itself is indeed an ancient Hindu law text, however one with a very
dubious distinction. For instance, a random selection of the ‘wisdom’ found
in the Manusmriti on caste is as follows:
Serving
Brahmins alone is recommended as the best innate activity of a Shudra;
for whatever he does other than this bears no fruit for him (123,
Chapter X).
They
should give him (Shudra) the leftovers of their food, their
old clothes, the spoiled parts of their
grain, and their worn-out household utensils" (125, Chapter X).
A
servant (Shudra) should not amass wealth, even if he has the ability,
for a servant (Shudra) who has amassed wealth annoys priests" (129,
Chapter X).113
If
there is a “Hindu text” that can be seen as codifying the
worst and most oppressive of caste and gender practices, it is the Manusmriti.
Not surprisingly, even as Golwalkar was writing his recommendation for
the application of Manusmriti, political thinkers and early Dalit
leaders like Dr. Ambedkar were articulating a full and detailed
critique of the Manusmriti.114 In
fact, Ambedkar who later on became the chief architect of the Indian
constitution, publicly burned the Manusmriti on December 25, 1927 as
a symbolic break with the old oppressive brahmanical order. This date
is
now celebrated by many Dalit women as Indian Women’s Liberation
day since the Mansriti is as patriarchal as it is casteist.115 Thus
by the late 1940’s an extremely articulate critique of caste
was in place and the RSS’s lament for the loss of the Manusmriti
on the eve of the adoption of a new and secular constitution for
a free India must
be understood as well informed and deliberate. The RSS mouthpiece,
Organiser, mourns the loss of Manusmriti within the new constitution,
describing the Manusmriti as a “unique constitutional development
in ancient Bharat” it goes on to say:
To this day his
laws as enunciated in the Manusmriti excite the admiration of the world
and elicit spontaneous obedience and conformity. But to our
constitutional pundits that means nothing.
Post-1980s Hindutva: A New Approach to Caste?
Against
this backdrop of an ideology that is central to Hindutva, how does one
analyze and understand the recent incorporation of lower caste and
Dalit leadership into the BJP/VHP?
The Hindutva
movement had receded considerably in the immediate post-independence
period and only began to re-emerge in the 1980s. Over the several
intervening decades, the Congress had consolidated the OBC and Dalit
votes in significant part, especially in North India. The decade
of the 1980s saw for the first time a fragmentation of this vote base
of the Congress in Northern India as various regional forces coalesced
under the umbrella of the “Third Front.” Backward caste leaders such
as
Mulayam Singh Yadav, Laloo Prasad Yadav, Ram Vilas Paswan, and Kanshi
Ram had begun to articulate a strident lower caste politics through
their own specific parties. The castes that had been kept out of power
for so long were abandoning the Congress and knocking on the doors of
New Delhi through new regional formations.
One of
the most crisis ridden phases in recent Indian politics was the period
between 1988 and 1993 when two huge events rocked the country – the
release and agitation around the recommendations of the Mandal
Commission, and the Sangh Parivar’s successful drive to destroy the
Babri Masjid. One way of reading that tumultuous phase of Indian
politics is to understand the release by the Third front government of
the Mandal Commission report which recommended a significant increase
in “reservations” (positive discrimination quotas) for backward castes
to meet the aspirational goals set by the founders of the Nation. For
the BJP, there were two significant truths they had to deal with. The
first was that, it could never hope to rise to power with its existing
social base of Brahmins and Baniyas. If it desired to hold office in
Delhi, the only way it saw was to take from the Congress some of the
backward caste/dalit vote, and therefore stop that vote from
consolidating under the regional parties/Third Front banner. However,
at the same time, it could not afford to alienate its existing base –
the Brahmin/Bania backbone of the movement. Hence the Sangh launched
two mobilizations almost simultaneously. On the one hand it started the
anti-Mandal agitation reflecting its true ideology and its existing
social base. Upper caste youth all across India were mobilized to take
a stand. Young upper caste men and women burnt themselves on the
streets of Delhi. The Sangh’s message was out – it was the only
political force that protected upper caste interests. At the same time
the Sangh started the Babri Masjid agitation. Here the image was of a
“weak” Hindu who had been oppressed by the “invading” Muslim and it was
Hindu society’s disunity that allowed these “external others” to
subjugate it. The political call was for “hindu unity” – all
castes and sects – under the banner of Hindutva. Advani’s rath
yatra from Somnath to Ayodhya, with the “garv se kaho ki hum Hindu hai”
(say with pride that we are Hindus) slogan, sought to symbolically
obliterate all hierarchies within Hindu society and position it as a
unified community against the Muslim “other.” If such a
consolidation of a lower caste vote under the rubric of Hindutva was to
be successful, it needed to deploy leaders from such communities who
had mass appeal. It is therefore, in the context of the
anti-Mandal/Babri Masjid agitations that leaders such as Sadhvi
Ritambara, Uma Bharati, Kalyan Singh and Narendra Modi emerge. Kancha
Iliah summarizes this argument succinctly:
In the
context of Mandal social reform, the BJP worked out the Mandir agenda
for which it needed a lot of muscle power. This was required for two
purposes: to mobilise Sudra/OBC social forces as vote mobilisers and to
intensify the rioting campaigns against the Muslims.
The
question then is whether this emergent backward caste leadership
within the BJP – one part of the Sangh combine – signify
a real change in Sangh politics. Such a change, would necessarily
be indicated through a
change in the RSS practices on the ground.
When
one looks at the RSS, its support for the maintenance of caste
hierarchy is not something that happened in the past – in the formative
years of the RSS or during the tumultuous years surrounding India’s
independence from British colonial rule. Even looking at just the
last two decades, while the Hindutva movement was rapidly expanding
its
social base, the Brahminic core of the movement still comes through
clearly.
Through
the decade of the 1990s, the Hindutva movement has consistently
been critical of the Constitution of
India with a demand that it be replaced by a “Hindu constitution.” The
RSS mouthpiece Organiser (May 10, 1992) reports on a VHP conference
as follows:
The
2nd state Hindu Advocates Conference organised by the Vishwa
Hindu Parishad at Madurai on April 18 and 19,
1992, has demanded the review and redrafting of the Constitution.
Shri V.K.S. Chaudhary, Advocate General of U.P. in his
key-note address
asserted that the Manusmriti rendered `justice for all'. Manu took
the entire mankind and its needs for ages and evolved his
code. Manusmriti
was for all times and ages and for all mankind".
Nothing
indeed has changed as the Manusmriti, like in the 1930s and 40s
continues to be its guiding text. So also, Giriraj Kishore, currently
the senior vice-president of the VHP responded to the inclusion of the
question of caste discrimination at the Durban Race and Reparations
conference as follows:
[The]
UN has no business to consider caste discrimination as
form of human rights violation… [Caste
denotes] what profession man has adopted [and is part of] "ancient
customs and system [which] "should not be and cannot be abolished
by any court.116
Such
defense of caste privilege and the desire to keep in place an
oppressive system has been a hallmark of the Hindutva movement
and its consistent and untiring reappearance in Sangh discourse is a deep
reflection of the complete absence of any social reform agenda
within it. Nowhere has this come through more clearly than the October 2002
lynching of five dalits by VHP activists in Jhajjar, Haryana. The
Sangh
Parivar thugs claimed that the Dalits had killed and skinned a
cow. Completely aside from the fact that nothing can ever
justify such a brutal act, the defense offered by senior Sangh
functionaries is
telling.117 On the day
after the lynching, October 16th, the local VHP/BD took out a victory
procession and Acharya Giriraj Kishore, senior vice president of
the VHP defended the action by quoting Hindu scriptures. Local
VHP office
bearers were more forthright. Ramesh Saini was clear that the Dalits
deserved to die. He said, “I will say it in front of the
police that what they were doing was wrong and they deserve to
be punished…”118
Another local official, Yashpal Gandhi went further: “Ravanas
found slaughtering cows had been punished" and those who acted
against them
“should be honoured.”119
Thus,
while the RSS may have expanded its social base with the inclusion
of members of the lower castes and Dalits as foot soldiers, and by
elevating a select few to second-tier leadership positions in the
BJP and VHP, its ideological architecture is marked by a unique
inflexibility. For all its claims of inclusiveness it has failed
to make any kind of social reform part of its agenda. As a matter of fact,
it has consistently militated against the forces of social reform.
As Dalits and other progressive forces built critiques of and challenged
the Manusmriti, the Sangh has consistently defended it. When efforts
to fulfill in some small measure the long-delayed promise of equality and
opportunity were set into motion through the Mandal commission,
the Sangh produced a violent and melodramatic counter mobilization. When
the core fault line of Hindu society was to be taken up at an
international forum such as the UN, the Sangh not just fought the
effort but defended caste as a “human right.”120
We
have analyzed the unchanging face of the Hindutva movement across
two moments in recent Indian history – between 1930 and 1950 and from
1980 to the present. The reason for picking these two moments are because
these are also the moments of its most rapid growth. One way of
reading these two moments is to understand them also as the two moments in
modern Indian history where the lower castes and Dalits have mobilized
most significantly to overthrow caste oppression. In the 1930-50
phase it was Ambedkar and the Republican party building on the work of the
Satyashodak movement of Maharashtra.121 In
the post-80s phase it was the emergence of powerful OBC and Dalit
formations which threatened to storm Delhi. In the first
phase the
center of the anti-caste movement was Maharashtra and the Hindutva
movement was conceived and put into motion by the Maharashtrian
Brahmin elite. In the second phase, the forces of anti-caste
mobilization have been more varied and Hindutva’s response
has been equally dispersed, playing out opportunistic vote bank
politics with different
alliances in different regions. What unites these moments of growth
is that empty call to Hindu unity and the invention of a common
enemy in
the Muslim at precisely the moment when the caste hierarchy comes
under severe threat. The preservation of one fascist ideology – Brahminism –
has necessitated for the Hindutva movement the invention of another – communalism.
In the long term then, the RSS will
either have to change its ideological position on caste to include, at
the minimum, an active social reform agenda, or continue to play an
opportunistic politics of caste mobilization. The former seems entirely
unlikely because that would mean the loss of the raison d’etre of
Hinduness and leave it without a core ideology. The latter is often
something that works for a while and cannot produce long term and
sustainable growth as a political force. Caste then maybe could be, in
Ilaiah’s words, “the Waterloo” for the Hindutva movement.
Next: Sangh
and Women
Endnotes:
[109] Throughout
this note we use the term “backward caste” to denote
those caste/jati groups that would be considered sudra in the
four fold varna
system. This term is used primarily because of its currency; the Indian
constitution and various State laws define the category as “Other
Backward Classes (OBC)” although this is s a list of castes. The term
Dalit is used to refer to the so called “untouchables” who fall outside
the caste system itself. The term literally means “oppressed people” and
is the term of choice among Dalits.
[110]
The notion of upper caste generally corresponds to the category
of dwija or twice born castes: brahmins, kshatriyas
and vaishyas.
[111]
The idea of the RSS/BJP being a Brahmin-Baniya party refers
to
the historical social base of the Hindutva combine (See next
section in
this note). Brahmin is the upper most caste in the four fold varna
system. The Baniya would approximately map on to the “Vaishya” category
of the four fold varna system.
[113] All
these quotations are from Doniger and Smith, 1991
[114]
Amedkar’s critique of Manusmriti is structured around
the idea that the
core ideology of “Hindu society” is Brahminism. Brahminism is the
structuration of society into a hierarchy –a “graded inequality” -
ordered along lines of pollution and purity, substantiated through
myth. In other words, as any ideology it is not attached to the body –
that is not all Brahmins follow Brahminism and backward castes are not
necessarily free of Brahminism. This is, according to Ambedkar, “the
soul of chaturvarna.” In a nutshell it reflects an ideology that orders
humankind into a hierarchy that is divinely granted and any individual
or group that works from within a paradigm of “graded inequality” --
as
him/herself inferior to some but also locating others as “inferior” to
him/her/them are operating within this ideological framework. For
Amedkar, the first and most important challenge to Brahminism came by
way of Buddhism and Jainism and it is his position that Buddhism
managed to strike terror in the hearts of the Brahminical order for a
good part of four centuries (from around 2 BC to 2 AD) and was finally
wiped out of India by Brahminic revivalism through the institution of
the Adi Sankaracharya on the one hand and the Gupta empire of the 4th
century AD. This tension is visible in interesting ways when we look at
Hindutva texts. For one, standard upper caste renditions of Hinduism
attempt to include Buddha as one of the ten avatars of Vishnu and the
Gupta period in Indian history is for the Hindutva combine a defining
moment for the sub continent and is constantly referred to as the
Golden Age of the Guptas, while many Dalit texts refer to the same
period as the Dark Age because it was the moment when Buddhism was
wiped out of India.
[115] https://lists.cs.columbia.edu/pipermail/ornet/2003-December/008559.html (archive)
[117]
This incident is in many ways truly indicative of how seriously
caste is a factor in Indian social life as also how deeply Hindutva has
penetrated the State apparatus. The State machinery was not only unable
too protect the five Dalit workers from the VHP mob, it failed it to
apprehend the culprits, institute an immediate inquiry and did not
extend the most basic of courtesies to the families of those murdered.
Instead, the administration conducted a post-mortem on the cow and
determined it was already dead by the time the Dalts could have got a
hold of it. Not only is the whole idea of forensically examining
dead cattle and ignoring dead people disgusting and bizarre, what is
worse is that such an act carries with it the implication that the
murders of the Dalits would be justified if it turned out that they had
killed the cow.
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